Venue:
MTA HTK 1097 Budapest Tóth Kálmán u. 4. fszt. K0.11-12

Abstract
Online social media are information resources that can have a
transformative power in society. While the Web was envisioned as an
equalizing force that allows everyone to access information, the digital
divide prevents large amounts of people from being present online. Online
social media, in particular, are prone to gender inequality, an important
issue given the link between social media use and employment.
Understanding gender inequality in social media is a challenging task due
to the necessity of data sources that can provide large-scale measurements
across multiple countries. Here, we show how the Facebook Gender Divide
(FGD), a metric based on aggregated statistics of more than 1.4 billion
users in 217 countries, explains various aspects of worldwide gender
inequality. Our analysis shows that the FGD encodes gender equality
indices in education, health, and economic opportunity. We find gender
differences in network externalities that suggest that using social media
has an added value for women. Furthermore, we find that low values of the
FGD are associated with increases in economic gender equality. Our results
suggest that online social networks, while suffering evident gender
imbalance, may lower the barriers that women have to access to
informational resources and help to narrow the economic gender gap.